The World University Rankings released today by Times Higher Education show the Georgia Institute of Technology has moved from No. 41 to No. 33, the highest ranking among Georgia’s academic institutions.

Tech Tower(Photo Credit: Ethan Trewhitt)

The Institute was 20th among U.S. institutions and fourth among public universities.

The 2016-2017 World University Rankings list the best global universities and are the only international university performance tables to judge world-class universities across all of their core missions — teaching, research, knowledge transfer, and international outlook.

The top universities rankings use 13 performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available. This year’s rankings include 980 universities from 79 countries, compared with 800 universities from 70 countries in last year’s ranking.

This year’s list of the best universities in the world features 148 of the top universities in the U.S. with 63 American universities making the top 200, including the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as the world’s No. 2 university, followed by Stanford University in third place, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in fifth, and Harvard University in sixth. Oxford University in England was No. 1 overall.

Times Higher Education global rankings feature many performance indicators directly relevant to students and their families to help them choose where to study. This information includes faculty-student ratios, global reputation, total resources, the international mix on campus, and links to business.

This is the first year the rankings data and methodology were subject to an independent audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

A $9.4 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) could lead to development of a new technique for wirelessly monitoring Internet of Things (IoT) devices for malicious software – without affecting the operation of the ubiquitous but low-power equipment.

The technique will rely on receiving and analyzing side-channel signals, electromagnetic emissions that are produced unintentionally by the electronic devices as they execute programs. These signals are produced by semiconductors, capacitors, power supplies and other components, and can currently be measured up to a half-meter away from operating IoT devices.

By comparing these unintended side-channel emissions to a database of what the devices should be doing when they are operating normally, researchers can tell if malicious software has been installed.

“We will be looking at how the program is changing its behavior,” explained Alenka Zajic, the project’s principal investigator and an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If an Internet of Things device is attacked, the insertion of malware will affect the program that is running, and we can detect that remotely.”

The four-year project will also include two faculty members from Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science: Professors Milos Prvulovic and Alessandro Orso. Also part of the project will be a research team from Northrop-Grumman, headed by Matthew Welborn. Details of an early prototype of the side-channel technique, called “Zero-Overhead Profiling” because the monitoring doesn’t affect the system being observed, were presented July 20th at the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA).

Within the next four years, an estimated 30 billion IoT devices will be in operation, doing everything from controlling home heating and air conditioning to sensing and managing critical infrastructure. The devices are usually small with limited processor power and memory. Their limited computing capabilities means they can’t run the kinds of malware protection software found on laptop computers, and they cannot use virtualization and other technology to protect the system software even when an application is taken over by an attacker. This means that once attackers compromise the internet-connected application, they typically “own” the entire IoT device and can even make it falsely respond to traditional queries about its own security status.

“The main challenge from a security perspective is to make these devices secure so somebody can’t take them over,” explained Zajic. “There will be a lot of processing power out there that needs to be monitored, but you can’t just put traditional security software on that processor because is doesn’t have enough power for both the security software and the tasks the device is supposed to be doing.”

Zajic and Prvulovic pioneered research on measuring side-channel signals emitted from devices. These emissions differ from the signals the devices were intended to produce for communicating information across the Internet to other devices. The researchers have already shown that they can pick up the signals close to the devices using specially designed antennas, and one project goal is to extend the range to as much as three meters.

“When a processor executes instructions, values are represented as ones and zeroes, which creates a fluctuation in the current,” Zajic said. “That creates changes in the electromagnetic field we are measuring, providing a pattern for what each part of the program looks like on a spectrum analyzer.”

Key to detecting changes in the signals is getting a “before” recording of what these signals should look like to draw a comparison with an “after” set of signals for each combination of device and software. The researchers plan to evaluate each IoT device, sampling and recording its typical operation to create a database. To avoid recording overwhelming amounts of data, the system will take periodic samples from different stages of program loops.

“If somebody inserts something into the program loop, the peaks in the spectrum will shift and we can detect that,” Zajic said. “This is something that we can monitor in real time using advanced pattern-matching technology that uses machine learning to improve its performance.”

Detecting malware, however, is more of a challenge.

“The technique is currently 95 percent accurate at profiling – pinpointing the exact point in the IoT program code that is currently executing,” explained Prvulovic. “However, detection of malware is a much more difficult problem. Profiling is about identifying which part of the program is the best match for the signal, whereas malware detection is about detecting, with sufficient confidence, that the signal does not match any part of the original program, even when the malware is designed to resemble the original code of the application.”

Zajic and Prvulovic have been studying a wide range of devices to determine the emissions produced.

“We have more than one source on a circuit board, so we have been trying to localize the sources so we can build an antenna to give us the best possible signal,” said Zajic. “There are multiple places on the board where you connect to the same information, though it may be modulated at different frequencies.”

Ultimately, researchers expect the project – dubbed Computational Activity Monitoring by Externally Leveraging Involuntary Analog Signals (CAMELIA) – to be capable of monitoring several IoT devices simultaneously. That will require development of advanced processing techniques able to differentiate signals from each device, and new antennas able to pick up the signals from a greater distance.

CAMELIA is part of a DARPA program called Leveraging the Analog Domain for Security (LADS), which is investing in six different initiatives to address IoT security. The Georgia Tech-Northrop Grumman project is the only one of the projects led by an academic institution.

The research is supported by the DARPA LADS program under contract FA8650-16-C-7620. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring agency.

When the U.S. Army updates the defensive and offensive software on its UH60M Black Hawk and AH64D Apache helicopters, the improved systems must be fully tested to make sure they’re working properly.

Georgia Tech Research Institute along with the Army Reprogramming Analysis Team have developed an MFD/MPD emulator that allows Aviation Survivability Equipment software updates for the AH64D Apache helicopter, shown here, to be tested in the laboratory.(Photo credit: U.S. Army)

That includes evaluating how information is represented on the multi-function display (MFD) and multi-purpose display (MPD), which use symbology to display threats to aviation platforms.

Until recently, that testing required the use of a real helicopter or costly display components that must be configured to operate in a laboratory environment. Thanks to an MFD/MPD emulator developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) in collaboration with the Army Reprogramming Analysis Team (ARAT), the testing can now be done on ordinary laboratory computers anytime it is needed. The new emulator saves a significant amount of money and can help get software updates to deployed Army aviation forces faster.

“This is an exact replica of what’s on the helicopter, so when they’re testing the software upgrades in the laboratory, they see exactly what the pilot is going to see in the helicopter cockpit,” said William Miller, a GTRI principal research scientists who helped lead the project. “When the final software for the electronic warfare system is deployed to the field, it is already tested with the display. That saves money and time.”

The project began with two days of observation into the operation of a multi-function display in operational helicopters at Dobbins Air Reserve Base north of Atlanta and Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. GTRI engineers watched as the pilots put the Aviation Survivability Equipment (ASE) through all its operations and recorded what happened on video.

Next, a development team led by GTRI Research Scientist Heyward Adams began developing the emulator in a standard military Windows-based computer, using cards to simulate the sensors that would normally be providing data to the MFD. The emulator plugs into the aircraft’s 1553 bus, and can simulate inputs from two radar warning receivers: the AN/APR 39A(V)1/4 and AN/APR 48A .

Though the lab-based computer isn’t flight-worthy, it provides the exact look-and-feel of the Apache and Black Hawk EW systems so Army mission software developers can make sure the graphical elements are clear and correct.

“We ingest the data that’s coming out of the cards just like the real hardware would in the helicopter and represent it accurately,” Adams said. “The graphics we generate provide the exact look and feel, which we showed to pilots of the helicopter to make sure we were accurate.”

The emulator is already in use by Army mission software developers in the ARAT laboratories in Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD. The GTRI researchers say the system could be easily adapted to other aircraft.

“The framework we used to develop the emulator is scalable, so it’s not tied to just one specific multi-function display,” Adams said. “Our system is set up in such a way that we could quickly and cost-effectively emulate other systems, or even an entire cockpit.”

The ASE tracks threats such as surface-to-air missiles. Because the helicopters fly at low altitudes, there’s little time to react, and no time for errors. Most threats are handled automatically, but the crew needs to know what is happening at all times.

“For pilots flying these helicopters, this is a primary display for all the threat information they are encountering,” said Miller. “This is their lifeline, and pilots have to be confident that the system will work right every time.”

Lockheed Martin and the Georgia Institute of Technology have signed a contract on a real estate deal that includes four buildings and 52 acres on Lockheed Martin’s south campus in Marietta, Georgia.

Collocated with five buildings occupied by the Georgia Tech Research Institute in Cobb County, the additional space for conducting and administering applied research will relieve crowding in Georgia Tech’s rapidly expanding research enterprise.

Two of the buildings included in the sale from Lockheed Martin to Georgia Tech are L-22, center, and L-59, small white building to the right. L-22 served as the main program, administrative and engineering building for the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter program from the mid-1990s until 2013 when the last of the F-22 employees left Marietta. L-59 was a training center.

“Lockheed Martin and Georgia Tech have worked together in numerous areas over the years,” said Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson. “This is another area in which our collaboration will prove to be mutually beneficial as we both look to serve our nation with our respective capabilities.”

The portion of the Lockheed Martin facility being sold previously housed the offices and operations for the F-22 Raptor program. These facilities were vacated when production of the F-22 ceased in 2013.

“This is a win-win situation as we evolve our business and assist Georgia Tech in expanding their capabilities,” said Karmyn Norwood, Lockheed Martin vice president for line of business integration.

The deal could see as many as 500 jobs located in Cobb County as Georgia Tech uses the facility for research and education.

“This is great news for Cobb County,” said Tim Lee, Cobb County Commission Chairman. “Both Lockheed Martin and the Georgia Tech Research Institute are great community partners and this purchase strengthens our reputation as a center for research, development and hi-tech jobs.”

About Lockheed Martin

Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 125,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services.

About Georgia Institute of Technology

Consistently ranked in the U.S. News & World Report’s top 10 public universities in the United States, the Georgia Institute of Technology is creating the next – the next idea, the next technology, and the next legion of agile minds well equipped to imagine and engineer our future. Georgia Tech provides a focused, technologically based education to 25,000 undergradute and graduate students committed to improving the human condition through advanced science and technology. Undergraduate and graduate degrees are offered in the colleges of Business, Computing, Design, Engineering, Sciences and Liberal Arts.

The Georgia Institute of Technology has named Chris Downing vice president of the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2).

The announcement ends a six-month national search for a new vice president, following Stephen Fleming’s decision to step down from the position in December 2015. As the Institute’s chief business outreach organization, EI2 is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive university-based program of business and industry assistance, technology commercialization, and economic development.

Downing reports to Stephen E. Cross, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech.

“I am thankful for this opportunity and I remain focused on our core mission at EI2 to fulfill Georgia Tech’s commitment to economic development,” Downing said. “Working with the dedicated professionals at EI2, we will enhance Georgia Tech’s work in designing the future through our service to entrepreneurs, business, researchers, innovators, and the people of Georgia.”

Downing had served as EI2’s associate vice president since 2012 and as interim vice president. He has been at Georgia Tech in various leadership roles related to economic development since 1988.

“EI2, including its multiple programs that support Georgia startups, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs across the state, serves all aspects of economic development in Georgia. It is a vital component of the innovation ecosystem we have built at Tech Square,” Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson said. “Chris has worked diligently to support and enhance our economic development initiatives, as well as to forge and maintain strong partnerships with other organizations across the state to strengthen the Georgia economy.”

Downing, whose past posts at Georgia Tech included serving as research engineer, program manager, regional manager, and director of the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP) — EI2’s largest program — has brought national recognition to the unit and several awards, including the 2014 Innovation Award in Economic Development from the Association of Public and Land Grant Institutions, the 2014 Outstanding Research Park Award from the Association of University Research Parks, and the National MEP Innovation Award in 2011 for the GaMEP.

“Chris has elevated EI2’s commitment to technology commercialization, business and industry outreach, and entrepreneurship,” Cross said. “Through his leadership, EI2’s stature and prominence in Georgia as the state’s most comprehensive economic development organization has risen. His passion and commitment to EI2’s mission has helped to make Tech Square the Southeast’s premier neighborhood for innovation and economic development and is instrumental in helping to define other innovation neighborhoods adjacent to the rest of the campus.”

About the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2)

The Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2) is the Georgia Institute of Technology’s chief business outreach and economic development organization. EI2’s core mission is to provide an exhaustive suite of programs to assist business, industry, entrepreneurs, and economic developers across Georgia. As the nation’s largest and most comprehensive university-base program of its kind, EI2 helps enterprises of all kinds and sizes and across all sectors improve their competitiveness through the application of science, technology, and innovation.

In addition to the GaMEP, EI2 houses a diverse group of programs, each focused on the needs of business and economic development. The programs include the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), the Contracting Education Academy at Georgia Tech, the Georgia Tech Procurement Assistance Center (GTPAC), the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) Center, the Southeastern Trade Adjustment Assistance Center (SETAC), VentureLab, and a variety of other programs that provide support and assistance in the areas of commercialization, entrepreneurship and business services.